Two references come to mind – the first is that the Avro C102 was beat by the de Havilland Comet, which was an example of a bad design with a good presentation. It had a series of mysterious hull losses that were eventually attributed metal fatigue accumulating around a square cut-out in the hull.
The second, more depressingly, is that the Avro C102 was cancelled to redirect resources to the Avro Arrow: Canada's mythical last jet fighter, of which only a handful were produced before the program was (painfully) cancelled, and Avro wound up. IIRC, the Canadian government was the main-to-sole bankroller of the project, and ballistic missiles became increasingly more important.
I'll argue that Comet was a good design, but with too many unknowns being solved at once - while we had limited experience with pressurization the comet took more cycles, and had a much higher service ceiling.
I dont think the Comet was a materially worse design than the Avro C102 (both aircraft are similar) and the C102 may very well have had other unknown issues only to be found if it went into series production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet#Comet_disas...
The second, more depressingly, is that the Avro C102 was cancelled to redirect resources to the Avro Arrow: Canada's mythical last jet fighter, of which only a handful were produced before the program was (painfully) cancelled, and Avro wound up. IIRC, the Canadian government was the main-to-sole bankroller of the project, and ballistic missiles became increasingly more important.